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The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

Harold is an ordinary man who has passed through life, living on the side lines, until he goes to post a letter one day...and just keeps walking. Harold is an ordinary man who has passed through life, living on the side lines, until he goes to post a letter one day...and just keeps walking. Harold is an ordinary man who has passed through life, living on the side lines, until he goes to post a letter one day...and just keeps walking.

• Hettie Macdonald
• Rachel Joyce
• Jim Broadbent
• Penelope Wilton
• 55 User reviews
• 40 Critic reviews

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• Trivia Jim Broadbent also narrated the audiobook of the story.
• Goofs Harold leaves on his Pilmgramage from Kingsbridge in S Devon, He is next seen by the garage in Malborough ( South rather than North of Kingsbtidge). Good job someone gave him a compass or he would never have got out of Devon.

Maureen : I see him on the television and everyone's clapping him. And he looks... so happy. And now he's got this young man with him, and I don't know who he is. It would be easier if he were dead! At least I'd know where I stood.

• Connections Referenced in OWV Updates: Cinema Ticket Update (27/04/2023) (2023)

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• May 3, 2023
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• April 28, 2023 (United Kingdom)
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• Harold Fry'ın Beklenmedik Yolculuğu
• Alfreton, Derbyshire, England, UK (location)
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• Runtime 1 hour 48 minutes

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If The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry follows a well-worn path, having Jim Broadbent and Penelope Wilton as guides makes it difficult to complain.

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The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry movie review: a patchy adaptation of the novel is elevated by its leads

This gut-wrenching British drama is about the incredible journey made by a respectable retiree. As the titular Harold, 73-year-old Jim Broadbent goes wild in the country (he dispenses with his debit cards, washes himself in streams, crashes on bales of hay). As he does so, every millimetre of the actor proves eloquent.

The film often follows paths we’ve travelled many times before. Adapted by Rachel Joyce from her own 2012 novel, begins with Devon-based Harold receiving a letter. His ex-colleague, Queenie (Linda Bassett), reveals she’s in a Northumberland hospice; basically, she’s saying goodbye.

For reasons that don’t immediately make sense, Harold thinks he can delay the inevitable by keeping her waiting for a face-to-face farewell (he rings the hospice from a public phone box and tells them to pass on a message: he’s on his way, coming by foot). He then calls his wife Maureen (Penelope Wilton on intense form), who thinks he’s gone mad and is not entirely wrong.

Joyce and the film’s director, Hettie Macdonald (Beautiful Thing), want to deconstruct the addictive appeal of ‘romantic’ gestures. What Harold is walking/running away from involves his and Maureen’s unhappy son, David (Earl Cave, son of musician Nick) and the flashbacks have cumulative power. Nepo babies are only aggravating when they’re mediocre and Cave totally belongs on the big screen – particularly in a scene where Harold gently wipes vomit from his son’s groggily grateful face.

Too bad Harold’s fellow pilgrims are so much more one-dimensional than David. Before and after Harold’s love-is-all-you-need stance turns him into an unwitting lifestyle guru, he encounters a string of misfits who are meant to capture what’s right and wrong with Britain. At its worst, the movie has the cloying air of a John Lewis ad, with a mongrel dog particularly irksome. Guardian angel mutts? Sweet Jesus, give me strength.

It’s also outrageous that Joyce (who’s well aware of Queenie’s charisma; in 2014, she wrote a whole book about her – The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy) makes no room for the character’s fascinatingly murky hinterland.

Never mind. Toss your debit cards aside and rely on the kindness of the strangers to get you into a screening of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. I’m kidding, to enjoy this hymn to minimalism you will, of course, need to fork out money. Is it worth the bother? Yes. So much about the film is ridiculous but, thanks mostly to the three wonderful leads, the grief at its core is no joke.

102mins, cert 12A

In cinemas from April 28

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The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

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The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry is a quintessentially British road trip

The screen adaptation of the bestselling book inevitably (and ideally) stars Jim Broadbent and Penelope Wilton – but plods along at an ambler’s pace.

By David Sexton

Medieval forms persist. Pilgrimage , Jonathan Sumption’s first book, published in 1975 when he was still an academic before he turned lawyer and controversialist, is a wonderfully detailed study of the entire phenomenon, as practised from late antiquity to the Reformation, relishing all its peculiarities. Pilgrimage, he concludes, maintains a fitful existence to this day. The needs it serves are perpetual perhaps.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry , published in 2012, was the debut novel of radio dramatist Rachel Joyce, developed from a short radio play to become one of the best-sellers of the year. She has since expanded the story into an unlikely trilogy, selling six million books. It’s a simple enough tale, albeit narrated in pedantic detail. Harold Fry, 65, living in retirement in Kingsbridge in Devon with his wife, Maureen, receives a letter from a friend he hasn’t seen for a long time: Queenie Hennessy. Writing from a hospice in Berwick-upon-Tweed, where she is dying of cancer, she bids him farewell.

[See also: Kristoffer Borgli’s Sick of Myself: the worst people in the world? ]

Harold sets off to post his reply but en route chats to a girl in a garage shop, who tells him, “You have to believe a person can get better,” and that, “if you have faith, you can do anything”. Harold feebly replies that “religion is not something I ever quite got the hang of”, but is persuaded, and spontaneously sets off to walk the 627 miles to Berwick, believing that while he keeps walking, she will keep living.

For, we gradually come to understand, he has much to expiate. He not only let down Queenie badly, after she rescued him from disgrace at work, but he also failed to save his gifted but tormented son, David, who got into Cambridge only to self-destruct. Harold and Maureen’s marriage has been a sham ever since. So now he is paying penance, hoping for salvation, perhaps a miracle. Or, as he puts it in his entirely English, hopelessly flat way: “I’ve spent my life not doing anything. And now at last I am.”

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For all his disavowal of religion, Harold’s journey truly is a pilgrimage, following the customs Sumption describes, from going all the way on foot, and embracing poverty, to attracting carnival crowds of dubious companions. The clarity of this structure supports this otherwise sentimental, even twee, work.

The great Jim Broadbent read the audiobook of the novel and he is inevitably (but also ideally) cast as Harold in this faithful adaptation, Rachel Joyce having written her own screenplay. Broadbent is the great virtuoso of the insufficiency of decency, the anguish of inadequacy. His face here is endlessly interesting, changing as the journey progresses, more weathered and whiskery, bleaker but also more comprehending.

Penelope Wilton is equally good as the repressed and repressive Maureen who tells Harold, when he rings her, that she’s hardly noticed he’s gone. To a neighbour, she observes of her husband, “It would be easier if he were dead, at least I’d know where I stand.” She’s so expert in such negation that her ultimate declaration of love for this dear man doesn’t entirely convince. Nor do the lights in the sky and sparkles in the dying Queenie’s room as signifiers of transcendence.

The film is director Hettie Macdonald’s first work since Normal People and rather less exciting than that, often plodding along itself. She has an unsparing eye for domestic frigidity – Maureen’s endless vacuuming, lace curtains and china dogs – but she and cinematographer Kate McCullough make the landscapes Harold traverses flow, the scenes having been shot consecutively, following Harold’s route. So here’s a quintessentially British road movie – except that road movies themselves are best understood as late, deflected acts of pilgrimage.

The country that took 100-year-old Captain Tom Moore’s own incredible journey around his garden to its heart may well rejoice in The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry . But the movie it should be compared to is David Lynch’s masterful The Straight Story (1999), about Alvin Straight who, unable to drive a car, rode a lawnmower across 300 miles of Iowa and Wisconsin to visit his ailing brother.

Alvin Straight was played by Richard Farnsworth, a Western and stunt actor, then 79 and terminally ill with metastasised prostate cancer in his bones, the paralysis of his legs visible in the film being real (Farnsworth took his own life a year later). Lynch loves the Midwest landscapes and the good people Alvin meets, and the whole film feels at once both natural and utterly rich and strange – truly miraculous, that pilgrimage. A better trip.

“The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry” is in cinemas now

[See also: God’s Creatures is a powerful portrait of a toxic mother-son relationship ]

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This article appears in the 26 Apr 2023 issue of the New Statesman, The New Tragic Age

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The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry review – Jim Broadbent hits the road

Jim Broadbent’s Harold goes on a 600-mile quest in Rachel Joyce’s sad and quirky story that is undermined by its implausibility

D espite being impeccably acted, sincerely intended and often beautifully shot, there is something basically unsatisfying in this quirky/sad movie, adapted by Rachel Joyce from her own Booker-longlisted novel; it is undermined by issues of tone and plausibility connected with that word “unlikely” in the title. The film presents partly as a sentimental oldie heartwarmer, but also asks us to believe in it as something more serious and even tragic: an emotional investment made harder by the unreality of what we’re seeing.

Jim Broadbent and Penelope Wilton play Harold and Maureen, a retired couple living a life of quiet boredom and desperation in Devon. Out of the blue, Harold gets a letter saying that an old work colleague of his is now in a cancer hospice in Berwick-upon-Tweed. This is Queenie, played all-too-briefly in flashback by Linda Bassett, and Maureen looks far from pleased to hear her name.

Harold writes her a stiffly uncommunicative letter of sympathy and wanders out to post it, nigglingly aware of how unsatisfactory his letter is; he decides that he has missed the collection time at his local post box, goes to find another post box, then another and then before he knows it – and inspired by a chance anecdote he hears from a young woman in a petrol station – Harold has conceived a desire to go on a full-on Forrest Gump quest. He will walk from Devon to Berwick to deliver his letter to Queenie by hand, having revelatory one-on-one encounters on the way, and temporarily amassing a crowd of excitable followers (more Life of Brian than Gump, maybe). Meanwhile poor Maureen climbs the walls with frustration and worry at home, left alone to face the elephant in the living room that they don’t talk about.

But what is he running away from? What is it all really about? The film gives us two big reveals: the secret heartbreak that Harold and Maureen share and the subsequent specific situation with Queenie. The first revelation is certainly very shocking, if sketched in very cursorily, and we actually hear little or nothing about what Queenie is really like.

But then there is Harold himself. We are asked to believe that he can walk all that way without proper boots or weatherproof kit or indeed any kind of map, and with just a quick patch-up from a sympathetic doctor at the start of his journey. And not just that: after a while he posts his keys, money and debit cards back to Maureen, so he doesn’t even get to stay at B&Bs: sleeping rough, eating wild blackberries and accepting charity (although those followers do get free pizzas and tents for a while). It’s a solemn, self-conscious fantasy.

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The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry review - affecting tale of a late-life road trip | reviews, news & interviews

The unlikely pilgrimage of harold fry review - affecting tale of a late-life road trip, jim broadbent creates a compelling portrait of loneliness and loss.

Here's another small gem of a film graced with a fine central performance by Jim Broadbent, after his lovely turn in The Duke. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry is, like the earlier film, the story of an eccentric older man who embarks on a risky enterprise, though it’s less comic and twice as affecting.

Broadbent has another grumpy wife here: after Helen Mirren in The Duke , Penelope Wilton (pictured below with Broadbent) plays Maureen, a sour woman with little to bring joy to her days. His Harold is a quiet man, living modestly in retirement in south Devon, who is suddenly galvanised into changing his life by a letter from an old friend and colleague, Queenie (Linda Bassett), now dying of cancer in a hospice in Berwick-on-Tweed. 

The extent of Harold’s inadequacies as a sentient human being are made very clear when he pens a letter to Queenie of the briefest, most desultory kind, even crossing out the word “ Love ” and putting “Best wishes” instead. Harold realises this is a totally inadequate response, as his four attempts at posting the letter show. Then a chance remark from a young woman at the till of a petrol station, about the healing power of hope, triggers his belief that if he doesn’t go home, but walks to Berwick on Tweed, instead, it will give Queenie something to live for. So he sets off, right there and then, with no proper clothing, not even a mobile phone.

This promises to be a long, samey trip of trudging through lanes and fields, so director Hettie Macdonald breaks it up with flashbacks to Harold’s memories – his family life, his time at the brewery where he and Queenie had worked 25 years earlier. Slowly the pieces fall into place: what Queenie means to him, why his marriage is so unhappy, how much he is to blame for that unhappiness, and how much he is not.

His wife, Maureen, meanwhile, is going on a journey of her own, mostly a stationary one. Once she realises Harold is missing, she cleans every inch of the house, pretends he is ill in bed to her neighbour Rex (Joseph Rydell) and works her way through various stages of anger, resentment, and regret. It’s a “journey” as significant as Harold’s, as she, too, is forced to stare the past in the face, for lack of an irritatingly placid husband to berate.  

We follow Harold through the back roads of southern England (though he seems to go through a time warp somewhere northeast of Bath and is suddenly in Derbyshire). But no matter, as the journey is often highly picturesque, apart from sudden irruptions of noisy dual carriageways that make Harold, and by now the audience, flinch. His walk becomes an encounter with the natural world, with the locals who farm the land he is crossing, with total strangers of all ages and ethnic origins who respond to him with kindness. One, an emigre Slovakian woman who is a qualified doctor at home but reduced to cleaning toilets, rather meaningfully gives him a compass. 

He refuses all offers of lifts, though does sleep at B&Bs here and there. But as the journey proceeds, he dispenses with all the trappings of his modest former life, sending home to Maureen his credit cards and watch, and only making the occasional phonecall to her about his progress. 

Inevitably, the modern world catches up with his pilgrimage, thanks to a man who posts a picture of him on social media, impressed by his selflessness. But Harold doesn’t feel selfless, and the posse of followers he attracts weighs increasingly heavily on him. Finally, he encounters a jobsworth unmoved by his circumstances, and his reaction to this coldness is immediate and overwhelming. Broadbent has never been better than in this scene; you start asking yourself, he's played Gloucester, but why has he never played Lear?

Weaving in and out of the narrative is the story of David, Harold and Maureen’s only child, strikingly played by Earl Cave, son of Nick, who appeared as a similarly disaffected goth in Simon Bird’s Days of the Bagnold Summer. Cave has a talent for mixing the sweet and the sour in a seamless blend. He has real presence and easily holds his own against old pros Broadbent and Wilton. 

As the finale of the story, adapted by Rachel Joyce from her 2012 novel, arrives, things get predictably softer-centred, but overall the potential whimsy of the plot is sidestepped, even though the kindness of strangers seems to stretch credibility when Harold is trespassing on farmland. But as a study of buried emotions and the paralysing hold of grief, it works well. You also get to go on a walking trip of some insanely beautiful English countryside, minus the blisters. 

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Shawn ashmore, garret dillahunt, elizabeth mitchell & jessy schram to star in psychological thriller ‘the huntsman’, jim broadbent to star in hit novel adaptation ‘the unlikely pilgrimage of harold fry’ for ‘normal people’ director; embankment launches sales — efm.

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EXCLUSIVE : Here’s a hot one out of Blighty. Oscar-winner Jim Broadbent is set to star in the movie adaptation of Rachel Joyce’s genuinely best-selling novel The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry .

BAFTA-winner Hettie Macdonald, who directed BBC and Hulu hit Normal People with Lenny Abrahamson, is aboard to direct, and BAFTA-winner Kevin Loader ( The Death Of Stalin ) will produce with Juliet Dowling and Marilyn Milgrom. Embankment have launched worldwide sales ahead of the virtual EFM .

Broadbent, who teamed with Loader on box office hit The Lady in the Van and recently starred in Venice Film Festival hit The Duke , will play the eponymous Harold, an ordinary man who has passed through life, living on the side lines, until he goes to post a letter one day…and just keeps walking.

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The character embarks on a 450-mile walk across the UK in the simple belief that his journey will save the life of his old friend Queenie who is dying in a hospice. Step by step, a spark is ignited in Harold’s hibernating soul as he rediscovers the majesty of the world, reflects on his mistakes, and finally gains the strength to face the unspoken grief that has driven him and his wife, Maureen, apart. The walk becomes a pilgrimage that inspires people far and wide but, more importantly, transforms Harold into a man who embraces the value of friendship, humility, self-forgiveness, and kindness.

The uplifting and redemptive book was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, won the UK National Book Award for the New Writer of the Year, and was a New York Times bestseller in 2012. It sold more than five million copies worldwide, including significant sales in the UK, China and Germany, where it remained on the bestseller list for a year.

Loader of Free Range Films produces alongside Essential Cinema’s Juliet Dowling and Marilyn Milgrom who together originated the project that has been developed with the support of The British Film Institute. The idea is to shoot in Q3, 2021, on location across the UK.

All in all, this sounds like a very winning combination for its genre.

Macdonald, who directed six episodes of Normal People , is also well known for directing on Howards End , Fortitude , Hit & Miss , White Girl and Dr Who . Her debut feature film Beautiful Thing was financed by Film4 and released in the U.S. by Sony Classics.

She said: “Rachel’s beautiful story is made for cinema: a raw and emotional portrait of a man battling long-buried feelings of grief and guilt in a vast landscape. I find Harold’s journey across England and his belief that he can make a difference extraordinarily moving and inspiring. I am enormously excited to be working with Jim Broadbent who I know will use his warmth, range and sensitivity to create an onscreen Harold who will lodge deep in the hearts of everyone who sees it.”

Author and writer Rachel Joyce added: “This story is a deeply personal one that has been with me for many years, and has resonated with readers, both young and old. Re-imagining it with Hettie has lifted it to a new level and I know she will make a film that will be beautiful, universal and truthful. It was a ‘small’ book that took the world by storm. We want the film to do the same.”

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Is The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry based on a true story?

“I will keep walking, and she must keep living.”

It shows us how Harold, upon learning that his old friend Queenie is dying of cancer in a hospice in Berwick-upon-Tweed, walks out of his Devon home to post a letter to her – but instead of putting it in the nearest post box, he keeps on walking. And walking.

Harold decides that if he walks all the way to Queenie, she’ll stay alive waiting for him, and so he carries on, even though the journey is over 400 miles and he is not prepared for it at all, having embarked on the walk in the clothes (and impractical loafers) he was wearing when he went to post the letter.

And he has left his mobile phone – and his wife, Maureen ( Downton Abbey ’s Penelope Wilton ) – at home, too. "The only time you walk is to get to the car," an astonished Maureen tells Harold when he finally calls her from a phone box.

Harold’s inspirational story certainly sounds like it is based on real events, but in fact it is not a true story .

It’s actually based on the novel of the same name that was written by Rachel Joyce and published in 2012. In an interview with The Guardian in 2014, Joyce revealed that many readers did believe the story was true. “People often do ask questions about Harold as if he were a real person,” she said.

While Harold, Queenie and Maureen may not be real people, Joyce has spoken about how she was inspired to write the book by her own father. “I began writing this as a radio play when my father told me he was dying,” she said (via BookBrowse ). “He had spent years battling cancer, and after several brutal operations, surgeons told him there was nothing left to be done. He was very frightened and so was I.

“I was appalled at the idea of not having my father. I was appalled at the idea of watching him die. But both happened, and while they did I wrote this story about a man who sets off to save someone else. It was my escape.”

Of course, many people have walked the length of England just like Harold – though usually for charity, and often taking an even longer route, from John O'Groats in the north to Land's End in the south. That's a distance of more than 870 miles – so hopefully the brave walkers who have attempted this were wearing more suitable shoes than Harold's.

While the story in the movie may not be true, the cast and crew of the screen adaptation did walk past and film at many of the landmarks and towns featured on Harold’s journey, and the movie was also filmed in chronological order so they followed the route in the book – no matter the weather.

“Because we were filming chronologically, if it was raining, we filmed in the rain, which is refreshing,” Jim Broadbent said in an exclusive interview with Digital Spy .

“It’s different, because normally if it rains it is a great crisis and everyone has to stop. But if it was raining on this one, we carried on and filmed in the rain. It was a really nice film to make in that way because the emotional journey was mirrored by the physical journey as well.”

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry is in cinemas now.

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Freelance film & TV writer, Digital Spy Critic and writer Jo Berry has been writing about TV and movies since she began her career at Time Out aged 18. A regular on BBC Radio, Jo has written for titles including Empire, Maxim, Radio Times , OK! , The Guardian and Grazia , is the author of books including Chick Flicks and The Parents’ Guide to Kids’ Movies . 

She is also the editor of website Movies4Kids . In her career, Jo has interviewed well-known names including Beyonce, Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, Kiefer Sutherland, Tom Cruise and all the Avengers, spent many an hour crushed in the press areas of award show red carpets. Jo is also a self-proclaimed expert on Outlander and Brassic , and completely agrees that Die Hard is a Christmas movie .

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The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry review: British cinema can do road movies after all

Harold's journey is anything but pedestrian..

What to Watch Verdict

Put your hero on foot and The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry proves British cinema can do road movies after all.

Jim Broadbent is in fine form

Shows off the English countryside

The film’s satirical touches don’t always work

Sometimes strays toward sentimentality

Think of the typical protagonist of a road movie and you will probably imagine someone young, rebellious and behind the wheel of a car, doubtlessly crossing the wide-open spaces of the United States. That description certainly doesn’t fit Jim Broadbent in The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry , an entertaining British comedy-drama based on actress turned author Rachel Joyce’s bestselling, Booker-shortlisted debut novel of the same name from 2012.  

Far from putting the pedal to the metal, Broadbent’s unassuming elderly gent goes to post a letter and ends up walking 600-odd miles across England from South Devon to Berwick-upon-Tweed. Yet, although he is on foot rather than in a car, his journey is no less epic, in its own way, than the trips taken by the road-movie genre’s customary leads. And, like them, he too is on a path of self-discovery and change.

When we first encounter him, Broadbent’s eponymous Harold Fry is very much a man stuck in a rut. He is retired from his managerial job at a brewery and it has been many years since he was loved by his wife, Maureen (a tightly wound, purse-lipped Penelope Wilton). As depicted here by Joyce (doubling up as the film’s screenwriter) and director Hettie Macdonald (perhaps best known for co-helming the TV adaptation of  Normal People ), his suburban existence couldn’t be duller or emptier.  

Then he receives a letter from Queenie, a former work colleague and friend who is dying from cancer in a hospice on the other side of the country. Uncertain how best to respond, he nonetheless sets out to post his reply. However, when a blue-haired, copiously tattooed young woman (Nina Singh) in a nearby garage relates the tale of her stricken aunt’s miraculous recovery, he decides to make Northumberland his destination, not the post box. "I'm going to save you," he scribbles to Queenie. "I will keep walking, and you must keep living." 

Harold couldn’t be less prepared for his impromptu journey — he is wearing yachting shoes and has no map or compass — but this doesn’t deter him in the least. "You will not die," he repeats, his mantra as he puts one blistered foot after the other. He has a touching encounter with a kindly Slovakian doctor (Monika Gossmann), and, less convincingly, is joined for a while by a motley assortment of fellow pilgrims, and ends up a media celebrity. 

The filmmakers stumble a little when they attempt to satirize the temporary companions Harold picks up en route, and there are also times when they threaten to veer off into sentimentality, but the story has a darker edge that stops things becoming overly twee. Harold’s dogged resilience is the dramatic engine that drives the film, but Broadbent also conveys the less attractive sides of Harold’s character and history, while Wilton introduces notes of anger, bitterness and frustration to balance the film’s overall mood of uplift, with timely flashbacks slowly revealing that the couple’s highly strung son has been the cause of their estrangement. 

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry  shows that a film about someone walking doesn’t have to be pedestrian. Along the way, its makers also disprove the notion that you can’t make a road movie on what DH Lawrence called "an island no bigger than a back garden". British cinema may not be able to match the widescreen vistas offered by American movies, but Macdonald and cinematographer Kate McCullough shows that the English countryside can be no less striking. Now and then on Harold’s journey, there are hints of something almost mythic and mystical about the landscape. As Harold says to himself while gazing alone at a beautiful sun-dappled view, ‘Who knew?’

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry hits UK cinemas on April 28.

A film critic for over 25 years, Jason admits the job can occasionally be glamorous – sitting on a film festival jury in Portugal; hanging out with Baz Luhrmann at the Chateau Marmont; chatting with Sigourney Weaver about  The Archers  – but he mostly spends his time in darkened rooms watching films. He’s also written theatre and opera reviews, two guide books on Rome, and competed in a race for Yachting World, whose great wheeze it was to send a seasick film critic to write about his time on the ocean waves. But Jason is happiest on dry land with a classic screwball comedy or Hitchcock thriller.

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The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

Harold Fry is an unremarkable man who has made mistakes with all the important things: being a husband, a father and a friend. And now, well into his 60s, he is content to fade quietly into the background of life. Until, one day – Harold learns his old friend Queenie is dying. Harold leaves home, walking to his post office to send her a letter. And out of the blue, Harold decides to keep walking, all the way to her hospice, 450 miles away.

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Movie Score

April 27, 2023,

Hettie Macdonald

Jim Broadbent, Penelope Wilton, Linda Bassett, Earl Cave, Joseph Mydell, Bethan Cullinane

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